The increasing complexity of the world requires, in some instances at least (I could argue many)
rolling it back. Cutting the gordian knot is a solution. Not everyone believes in the inevitable and glorious march of progress. I find it ironic that many estonians sought to escape from under the thumb of an empire to willingly throw themselves under another shortly after. Every argument made for being a province of the EU could have been made to defend remaining a province of the USSR back then...
Capabilities depend more on people than anything else. To give them up is to lose know-how, which is very hard to build.
I'm more concerned with pharmaceuticals than vehicle testing. As for which countries inside the EU can do it easily, the EU's own report states that "After September 2015 Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands undertook additional tests beyond the NEDC test, and used the outcomes of these complementary tests to search for the potential use of prohibited defeat devices (Finland will start tests next year)." Others I am sure could do it of they wished. They have not, and they had not during the decade prior, because it was
more comfortable to let the EU play with its regulations and not raise waves. Absent the EU's centralized role in policy-making, I believe they would have. I also strongly suspect, but cannot prove to you here with published documentation, that the reason these and other states were so set against the push for more stringent regulations was that people from those countries taking part in the process (because Brussels hasn't imposed a dictatorship yet) knew those regulations, and the whole process, was phony. But upsetting the Brussels apple cart takes some balls, is not conductive to career building...
In any case not having vehicle testing at all would hardly be worse than the testing theater the EU acted for years: my point is that the testing allegedly done in the EU (that everyone felt safe about)
was a fiction. For over 10 years the European Commission bureaucracy knew about the tests being fake. They commissioned research into it that showed emissions up to 15 times what was measured in the lab. And they carried on to make their "more stringent standards" based on the very same lab testing that was providing phony data.
They cannot be trusted. What heads rolled inside the EU bureaucracy over this? None that I know of. These people were playing around with legal fictions while ignoring the plain, demonstrated reality. And the only thing that brought them to even admit it was another country outside the EU raising a fuss.
The same institutions that produced this shameful disaster then had the gall to write into their report things such as this:
14. The Member States’ failure to take an active part in the “Real Driving Emissions – Light Duty Vehicles” (RDE-LDV) working group constitutes maladministration. It can be concluded from the minutes provided that, with the exception of a few Member States, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Denmark and Spain, the vast majority did not participate in the RDE-LDV working group, despite voicing criticisms of the Commission’s proposals.
15. The analysis of the minutes of the RDE-LDV working group and of the TCMV shows that some Member States acted on several occasions to delay the adoption process of the RDE tests and to favour less stringent testing methods. In addition, several Member States (Italy, Spain, France, the Slovak Republic, Romania and Hungary) prevented the formation of a qualified majority in the TCMV, resulting in a postponement of the vote on the first RDE package, and therefore a delay in the whole RDE process, which is still not completed today, but was initially envisaged to be applicable for compliance purposes as of the date of introduction of the Euro 6 emission limits (2014 for new type approvals and 2015 for all new vehicles). As a result of certain Member States favouring a higher value for the conformity factor, new car models will not have to respect until 2020 the not-to-exceed Euro 6 emission standards, already agreed by the co-legislators in 2007. This is six years later than originally planned and three years later with respect to the timing proposed in the Commission CARS 2020 communication of 8 November 2012.
16. The analysis of the minutes of the TCMV meetings shows that many Member States (Italy, Spain, France, the Slovak Republic, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, the United Kingdom and Austria) strongly opposed the more ambitious Commission proposal for conformity factors for NOx limits and instead settled for higher conformity factor values corresponding to weaker environmental objectives. Some Member States presented a different position to the public from that they presented to the participants of the TCMV.
So
member states are supposed to be evil because they opposed the crazy new regulations that could not be met and were not being met? 
But the bureaucracy driving the process, those must always be right. The view from Brussels is always that they do not serve the member states, the member states exist to serve and obey the will of the bureaucracy in control of the Commission! And I say in control of the commission because that is the way they act. Who does most of the drafting of the new legislation? With whom exactly do the lobbyists talk?
What failure does the commission bureaucracy admits for itself? Why, not having managed to override the state's objections to its new legislation of stricter emissions limits faster!
17. The Commission failed to use the means at its disposal, at the level of the TCMV and of the RDE-LDV working group, to advance the decision-making process and ensure a timely adaptation of the type-approval tests to reflect real-world conditions, as required by Article 14(3) of Regulation (EC) No 715/2007.
18 . Despite the issue of pollutant emissions from vehicles being not only a highly sensitive and political issue, but also a subject of great concern to EU citizens, the Commission did not make any attempt to advance the decision-making process by making use of the possibility envisaged in the Regulatory Procedure with Scrutiny to bring the proposal to the level of the Council in order to increase political awareness and to exercise additional pressure on obstructing Member States. The Commission’s failure to act in a timely manner on its responsibility to keep the test procedure under review and to revise it to reflect real world conditions constitutes maladministration.
The
arrogance of these people! What are the odds of someone managing to kick them around until they got into their thick heads that they are servants of the states that make up the EU? Zero.
Not only they cannot be trusted, they are never punished and they never learn. And that is why the EU as a whole must go. Experience has shown it to be impossible to fix from the inside.
For standards you do have a point that most are written by the main countries and picked and chosen by others because of their influence over trade and manufacturing. But the EU is entirely unnecessary for agreements to be reached between countries for that purpose, of for countries to by itself pick standards their larger neighbors made. And they will get more of a choice of a choice on it than a small country will get in terms of influencing the standard the EU imposes on its member countries. And they will be critical of any new regulations, and resistant to adopt them if they clash with the local reality.
. It's the best thing we got, as the English Brexiteers just have shown us spectacularly. I can imagine an alternative history where other nations would have taken up the British proposal and created a more neo-liberal Europe with less regulation and less consumer and employee protections. But I still believe in a European way as opposed to an American or Chinese System and maybe that's more the question: Where you put the alternative geographically.
) is a clear signal to everyone what the EU collectively thinks about corruption...
